Jennifer Ling Datchuk American, b. 1980
Girl Fight, 2025
Porcelain, Asian human hair
pot 1: 8" x 6" x 4.5"
pot 2: 8.5" x 6" x 5.5"
pot 2: 8.5" x 6" x 5.5"
'Girl Fight' is not a brawl between two young women in the schoolyard but the internal fight that happens within oneself. No matter how empowered, no matter what we have...
"Girl Fight" is not a brawl between two young women in the schoolyard but the internal fight that happens within oneself. No matter how empowered, no matter what we have attempted to reclaim, women still find themselves moving back and forth among choices dictated by narratives we did not create. Ripening and becoming. Pregnancy and postpartum. Fertility and infertility. Personal and political. Private and public. Childless and childfree. Alien and mother. Curly and straight.
Two porcelain Song dynasty-inspired pot forms are incised with blue and white imagery of Datchuk's visual vocabulary that depicts the historical, collective, and personal - fertility figurines, aliens, bobby pins, maternal DNA structures, pregnancy tests, and combs. The internal fight is subject, the physical becomes object, and clay is body - the pot form and its shared language of the human form. Sprouting from the necks of the pots is Asian curly and straight human hair that comes together in one giant knot, depicting how dualities are complicated and very personal.
